


Gifted

by Querulousgawks



Series: Tumblr Prompts [15]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Family Feels, Family backstory, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, magical gifts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-04
Updated: 2017-11-20
Packaged: 2018-11-23 10:27:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11400687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Querulousgawks/pseuds/Querulousgawks
Summary: It’s in the water, is what they said in Georgia. Nobody ever had a superpower until the government started chlorinating and fluoridating, they said, and it was widely believed that folks off the city treatment systems were immune.





	1. Bitty

It’s in the water, is what they said in Georgia. Nobody ever had a superpower until the government started chlorinating and fluoridating, they said, and it was widely believed that folks off the city treatment systems were immune.

It was said that the Yankees blamed it on climate change, which was just typical.

Eric Bittle thought the world had probably had superpowers all along, and folks just used to be better at keeping secrets. It was certainly a skill he possessed, but lying about himself wasn’t his Gift; he had earned secrecy through the same desperate practice he had applied to ice skating, then hockey. Because he had to.

A Gift was never genuinely useful, as far as anyone could statistically determine. The question had been more rigorously studied than many diseases, because if there was ever a time Americans were going to care about unfair advantages, it was in sports, and a lot of Gifts were physical. But the studies consistently found a difficulty counterbalancing every Gift: people who could see outside the visible spectrum, for instance, spent a lot of time squinting distractedly, and kids with extended hearing range usually got fitted for earplugs just to get through the day.

It still caused a lot of wrangling. ESPN ran a special annual round-up that was supposed to be an objective analysis of Gifts in sports, and invariably dissolved into speculation about individual athletes’ superpowers. Retirees often revealed their own Gifts, and it just added to the pressure on current players to disclose, especially when the Gift and the corresponding drawback were harder to see from the outside. Plenty of folks didn’t even believe there was a corresponding drawback, when the Gift wasn’t physical, regardless of the scientific evidence. How could you prove it? Could you really take the invisibly Gifted at their word?

Like if someone could read minds, for instance; you might think that was, for once, a costless Gift. The one free lunch.

You’d be wrong.

Eric Bittle couldn’t reach out and snatch thoughts from someone’s head - it was more like they invaded his, unpredictably, one trailing phrase at a time without context or identification. Not that you needed a lot of context for the passing thoughts that happened when someone glanced his way, at least in Madison. He heard a lot of ugly words for what he was before he learned any of the nice ones - and he heard them in his own voice, years before any of them were spoken aloud.

He picked Samwell University after a trial visit to campus ended and he realized he’d spent 48 hours without catching a gay slur in that weird, echo-y place inside his head. He’d spent 12 of those hours with _hockey recruiters_ , and he _still_ hadn’t heard any, even the guilty half-choked off version that happened at family gatherings. One coach was thinking worriedly about height, and a few of the thoughts drifting by were about _the 25th percentile_ , which seemed weird at the time but still a hell of a lot friendlier than home.

It can make a lot of decisions for a person, their Gift. No sense ‘engaging in counterfactuals’ as Coach would say after a hard game, or when he’d been reading too much military history, but Eric sometimes wondered if he’d have had such trouble in football without his Gift telling him what the other kids were _really_ thinking as they came in for a tackle. By the time Eric was a teenager, he and Coach could joke about it, a little, especially if it was a late enough drive home from competition that Coach needed Eric's chatter to keep awake.

“Coulda been a contender,” Eric said once, drunk on exhaustion and the feel of the state championship award banging against his legs under the dash. It was 2 AM and he’d just qualified for Southern Regionals; it felt like he could say anything, even to his father, even with no sense of what he was thinking. Even without his mother there to translate and placate. Eric could usually pick up a thought or two from his mother, more feelings and impressions than words. (It wasn't _quite_ like seeing the expression on her face that she’d be making if nobody was watching, but it was more like that than anything else.) But he’d never once in his life heard anything from Coach but the words that came out of his mouth. Most of the time they were both grateful, he was pretty sure, but sometimes - whatever.

He aimed a perfect spiral with an invisible football, then propped his elbow on the ledge and stuck his hand out the window, catching the silky feeling of warm air flowing past his palm. “A _contender,_ ” he said again. “Right?” He didn’t know why he was asking. He thought he probably shouldn’t be. But Coach just laughed.

“Coulda been,” he agreed, and jerked his head at the trophy. “Getting farther on those skates than your old man ever did on cleats, so.”

Eric let his head thunk back against the seat rest. Coach had had perfect form, fearlessness, and incredible lung capacity; he could sprint the field and shake off just about anybody fast enough to catch him. Eric had grown up with teachers reminiscing about Ricky Bittle, pulling their backwater high school team out of obscurity and bringing college recruiters into town with their big dreams and full scholarships. Their stories always ended there, though. He’d had to learn the rest of it from his mother.

Coach had been nineteen when his annual physical revealed an oddity, and got him sent to the specialist that found the tiny hole forming in his heart. Rare, but more common in student athletes than in the rest of the population, and nothing fatal if he kept his heart rate within a certain range. For the rest of his life.

Not a consequence of a superpower, just one of those things.

That car ride was the only time they talked about it, but Eric thought about it a lot over the next few years, that little flaw that changed his father's life. When he watched his score tick up at Southern Regionals; when he lay flat on his back in a janitor’s closet, when he stepped onto the ice for the first time with a stick and all that _ridiculous_ padding. Whenever he tried to build a wall to keep the voices out and they trailed in anyway, he thought of that drive. They were lucky, his mother had said when she first told him the story. Coach had taken to sports management like a duck to water, and ended up providing for his family better than most of his teammates had been able to. His father wasn't there for the conversation, having just nodded permission at Suzanne and left the kitchen when Eric asked about it, and the only thing he picked up from his mother's mind was a red-hot protectiveness and a sense of pride.

Recruiters never came down to Madison for Eric’s hockey, but when the manager of his co-ed team told him to check out New England colleges, Coach was the one who helped him make the tape.

A year later, Coach drove him up north for the campus visit and then headed out to a hotel after making sure Eric was at the right dorm. Coach’s Gift was undoubtedly in navigation - he never missed a highway exit and could find north on a fishing trip no matter how far they were from land - but he couldn’t for the life of him give anyone directions. He shook the tour guide’s hand and left his son with a clap on the shoulder.

On the ice, Eric could spin and spin and never lose his balance, but when he walked through Samwell’s campus, the low hum of acceptance running through his mind was literally dizzying. He accepted a pillow from his host, sprawled on Johnson’s floor and whispered, “Full. Athletic. Scholarship.” to himself as the lights went out.

(If he caught, under Johnson’s low chuckle, an unusually wispy echo of a thought about _the narrative picking up soon -_ well, you know. _Goalies._ It didn’t stop him from drifting off to sleep.)


	2. Nursey

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Derek would be mostly warm again by then, but the shivers would linger, sporadic, for days. No action without opposite reaction; no Gift without a price.

Derek Nurse discovered his Gift and outed it in the same ten seconds, to most of the fifth grade, over an ant. It was just like him, his dad always said, recounting the story to business associates, school counselors, a ref at a hockey game one particularly uncomfortable time. Just a dramatic kid - sensitive. Always making mountains out of molehills. 

There weren’t any adults around, that first time it happened, just a playground monitor conveniently not watching their corner. The ants had been crackling under the magnifying glass. Derek had been able to smell it, had heard it over the roaring of his ears, even as he tried to laugh along with the rest of them, and when he finally said _stop, stop_ , they’d all turned and stared at the same time. He’d had to do something. 

“This is cooler,” he’d said. “Look.” He cupped his hands together. The roaring got louder. He just had to hold their attention - Benny was scoffing already, turning away with the lens. “Wait,” Derek yelled, and when he’d swung his arms apart a flame roared out between them.

It - was a bit of a situation. Benny had fallen right over and gotten ants in his pants, and KellyAnne, who Derek’s mama said couldn’t help but make everything about herself, swore her dress had caught on fire. The wooden bridge from the tire to the swingset would never be the same. 

Still, there was a moment - between coming back to himself, and realizing that he was Gifted and freezing and probably going to cry soon - when Derek felt a touch on his shoulder. It was Cal, the tallest boy in school, who would only ever raise his voice when it was time to feed the classroom hamster. Cal was looming like a wall between him and the other kids. Derek tried not to flinch. 

“Thanks,” Cal muttered, and that held Derek together, more or less, until his parents arrived.

No matter what situation he was excusing, Mr. Nurse never sounded exasperated. A little ragged, maybe, but it was always layered over fondness, and his hands would be steady on his son’s shaking shoulders.

“He’ll chill out,” was usually the promise, and then usually Derek’s teeth would chatter, and everyone would laugh.

Once the fire was out and the strangers were pacified, they’d go home, just another funny rich-kid story. Derek would be mostly warm again by then, but the shivers would linger, sporadic, for days. No action without opposite reaction; no Gift without a price.

His dad was never mad at home, either, but some nights he’d stop Derek, draped in his grandma’s afghan, just before his bedroom door. “Malik,” he’d whisper, and his fear would set the cupboards rattling, despite his decades of controlling the Gift. “Son, you have to - you can’t. Someday -”

Derek would shrug out of the blanket and run into his father’s arms, in the early years, or later stare down and press his hands flat against the walls. He was trying. He knew, okay? He knew.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally for the #omgcptropechallenge on Tumblr.  
> "I'll just clean it up for AO3," I said. "It's just a worldbuilding snippet." Anyway, Bitty's chapter turned into a father-son introspection extravaganza and Nursey's chapter will probably be one too.  
> The car conversation is inspired by a scene from Haven Kimmel's novel Something Rising, Light and Swift, and a little bit from the car ride in Fun Home, but the Bittle story has a happier ending than those. Because the point is that Bitty wins, by God.


End file.
